Well, last week I finally did it. I put up an Obama sign in
the yard. Not that anyone sees my yard.

But now that the Editors of Seed magazine have come out with an
endorsement, I may as well join the crowd and openly announce my
anonymous support, here on the Internet.

I don’t like his plan for health care finance. I am
unenthusiastic about his plan to prolong the war. His
environmental policies are too little, too late. Not that he
could have done anything about the too late part.

Since those are my three top issues, it leaves me lukewarm at best.
Still, the prospect of a McCain-Palin occupancy in the White
House is horrifying.

For a while, I did not think it would matter much, so I thought I would
do the treasonous thing, vote for Ralph Nader.

Somehow, though, even the fearsome spectre of a McCain-Palin White
House is not enough to generate a bunch of enthusiasm. It’s
scary enough that I won’t vote for Nader, but that is about it.
You see, I am not convinced that the neocons are dead and
gone. Perhaps we need another four years of Republican
administration to do them in. It is sort of like the idea of
taking an entire course of antibiotics. You have to make sure
that the very last little bug is no longer viable.

Now, the big issue on everyone’s mind is the economy. It is
perfectly clear that neither administration would be able to save it.
Still, it might make a little bit of difference.
With Obama-Biden, at least the middle class with have some
bread crusts, and the poor people will get some crumbs. With
McCain-Palin, the middle class would get the crumbs, and the poor
people simply would starve to death.

Even now, the experts have decided that the old “misery index” is no
longer good enough. Now, the practitioners of the dismal
science have come up with the “
href="http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/10/29/measuring-misery/">augmented
misery index.” See,
the old misery wasn’t good enough, so now we have augmented
misery. It’s at an all-time high.

But enough of that. Back to the rationale for the
endorsement. The pro-life McCain-Palin ticket, bless their
hearts, would do their
best to make sure that childhood starvation becomes a stark reality in
the USA. I’m not at all sure that Obama-Biden can stop that,
but at least they will try.

I used to think that I would care about which President would be more
supportive of science. Not any more. I can’t carry
that torch any longer, because the public doesn’t care. They
never did. There’s a limit to how long one can remain
optimistic, in the face of deafening apathy. And the
environment? The only thing that can save it is a collapse of
economic activity.

Finally, a silver lining. Joy to the world. And all
that.

We had three wishes. The last one is gone. We could
have used the relative prosperity of the 2004-2006 era to make a major
push for renewable energy, public transportation, relocalization of
food production, and rebuilding the middle class. We did none
of those things.

Instead, we had our cute little “surge,” increased our military
spending, ignored the biggest epidemic
of white-collar and political crime the world has ever seen, and shed a
few tears over the plight of the polar bears.

i was just looking at a blogpost i did on june 30, 2006 – titled “the next president of the united states”. i was on this bandwagon before anyone knew his name – because i knew of him when i was at university of chicago, and liked some of his ideas. but the thing i like the most is his tone. i like the tone.